Websites using Adobe Flash often are visually appealing and artistically elegant, yet they end up causing many issues both for the website owner and for the website viewer. With the many options now available for building attractive websites today, Flash has proven to be outdated and a headache for all parties involved. Websites that have Flash have issues for multiple reasons:
- Information embedded in Flash is often invisible to search engines – Search engines do their job by scanning content – text, tags, headings, titles – to appropriately rank sites for their keywords. Content embedded in Flash is difficult to recognize and makes it much harder for search engines to read. This leads to missed opportunities for ranking.
- Lack of consistent cross platform support – Flash is only supported by certain browsers and operating systems and regularly needs updating to work properly. Today, if web viewers have to make an update or download something new just to view your website, they will go elsewhere and find the same information much more easily.
- Some users disable Flash to avoid Flash based advertising – Do you know what this means? It means they are not only going to avoid seeing advertising, they are going to avoid seeing your website content. If they come to your site and all they see is blank space where you have Flash content, your site will look broken, incomplete, and unprofessional.
A web viewer might see something like this, instead of your content:
The content you put time and effort and money into doesn’t work and asks the viewer to jump through hoops just to see it. Nobody is happy and you may lose customers because of it.
So…You’ve got a website that uses Flash – what can you do?
There are several strategies available for solving Flash problems on your website. Content can be changed to not use Flash, and Flash navigation can be remedied in a relatively short amount of time by Old City Web Services experts. Let us evaluate your site’s specific issues and give you the best options for optimizing your site and making it much more user friendly for both you and the viewer.
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